Missing for more than 60 years, remains of airman finally home

The last time Kathleen Lund saw her brother, he was going off to war. It was May 1943 and she was 19.

David L. Harris

The last time Kathleen Lund saw her brother, he was going off to war. It was May 1943 and she was 19.

Last week, the Department of Defense announced it had identified the remains of Lund’s brother, 2nd Lt. Ronald Ward of Cambridge, and 10 other airmen who had perished in the jungles of New Guinea aboard a B-24D Liberator plane just after it had bombed a target.

They never returned to Dobodura, New Guinea, from where they departed. In 2000, three New Guineans were hunting in the forest, came across the plane near the village of Iwaia and told officials about the find.

It wasn’t until 2004 when a group from the Department of Defense’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command examined the wreckage. For three years, the group combed through the scene and found human remains and identification tags.

Among the items collected were Ward’s high school ring with his initials (“RFW” — the F was for Francis) and his bombardier ring — also engraved with his initials.

“Now, it really feels like closure,” said an emotional Lund, now an 83-year-old Malden resident and a retired schoolteacher who taught for many years at the old Maynard School.

Larry Greer, spokesman for the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office, said the find occurs about 100 times per year, but “they’re not always this large.”

Ward, a 1937 Rindge Technical school graduate, enlisted in the Army in 1939. Before the Army, Ward, who stood around 5-foot-9 with brown hair and hazel eyes, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, stationed in Vermont. He also went to Washington, D.C. to witness the second presidential inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lund described her brother as “bright” (he entered a history contest while at Rindge and was business manager of the yearbook) with a dry sense of humor. But he was destined for military service in the Army Air Corps, the predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, she said.

“When he left there [Vermont], he wanted to make a career of the military,” she said. “Whoever knew he was going to war? He was stationed at Logan [Airport]. When the war broke out, they sent him to training school.” Then it was off to the South Pacific in 1943. Just a year before, the U.S. had ordered forces to halt the Japanese from encroaching on the South Pacific.

Lund distinctly remembers a letter she received from her brother shortly after he arrived in New Guinea. “I’m writing to you, sis, and I’m sitting on my cot and there’s water all around the cot,” it read.

On Dec. 3, 1943, Ward and his fellow airmen took to the skies on a bombing mission and were never heard from again. Search crews found nothing. Lund still remembers the date when the military sent a telegram to her home informing her family that her brother was missing in action: Dec. 17, 1943. And 24 agonizing months later, the military pronounced Ward dead. Lund was 19, working at a Kendall Square airplane parts factory at the time.

“We learned to cope with it,” said Lund.

The Ward family has deep roots in Cambridge. Lund’s great-grandfather settled in Cambridge and Lund herself lived in Cambridge for 73 years. When she moved to Malden 11 years ago, she still commuted to the Maynard School to teach. Her father worked at the old Lever Brothers factory.

“It’s a bittersweet time for our family,” said Lund’s daughter, Susan. “My mother hasn’t really known the fate of her brother. On the one hand, she’s glad to know exactly what happened to her brother. At the same time, it brings up a lot of emotions.”

Ward and his 10 fellow airmen will be buried under one headstone at Arlington National Cemetery this summer.

“We know that some members that he ate with, slept with, they’ll all be together now,” said Kathleen Lund.